


Contretemps

by vanarian



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Avengers Family, Ballet, Clint Is a Good Bro, Dancer Natasha Romanov, Gen, Natasha Feels, Natasha Needs a Hug, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Natasha-centric
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-24
Updated: 2017-07-24
Packaged: 2018-12-06 04:26:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11592912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanarian/pseuds/vanarian
Summary: Contretemps is a ballet term which means “beating against time”. It is a preparatory motion, and before the beat of the music the dancer will start a new step. Natasha has been fighting to make her own way since her childhood. Taking back a part of her past may be the only way to move forward into her future.





	Contretemps

**Author's Note:**

> En avant is a classical ballet term which refers to the direction of a step, specifically, moving forward or to the front.

She comes into SHIELD with a ledger full of red. Red like the Red Room where they trained her, where they made her into a weapon and taught her to turn people into targets and see a world full of lies. 

She doesn’t know what isn’t a lie anymore, her whole life has been lies, false memories and manipulation and lying and being lied to.

The Red Room had trained her, and when they trained her in grace and movement and athleticism they trained her in ballet, and she loved to dance. It was training but for all that it was rigid and  
structured and as controlled as everything else in her life, it was freedom, because she was controlling it, she was controlling her body and maybe she did anyway, the rest of the time, controlling her body to do what she was told to do, but this was different, this was her making something beautiful instead of tearing something down, this was giving everything she had for something that could make her feel alive –

\- and it was a lie. She never went to the Bolshoi Theatre, never trained there in ballet, that was a lie just like everything else in her life, and now she wonders, did she really love ballet? Could she have loved something when everything she remembers was a lie, or is that love, that freedom, just another lie like everything else?

She tries to find out, once, twice. Goes to take a step, to place herself into first position, or fifth, she doesn’t know because she can’t make herself take the step, can’t seem to lift her foot, because if they made her love this then it is another victory for them, another step back for her, and she won’t go back to who she was before.

She has red in her ledger, but she means to wipe it out.

Then, there was ballet, and there was infiltration. There was dancing and grace and beauty, and there was a deadly beauty that held a gun and killed and killed and killed – 

Now, there is him. He pulled her out of where she was before, and told her she could become something more than what they made her. She does the work she knows how to do, but in a world full of lies where she doesn’t know what is right and what is wrong, and some days she doesn’t know what is up and what is down, and everything they did to her is everything she knows, there is only one way to move forward.

She doesn’t know how to stop lying, stop living a lie, stop living the lie that they implanted in her, trained her into, but she is a performer. She has always been a performer. And so she pretends that she can see the difference, and on good days she almost believes it herself, that she can see the difference between the Red Room and SHIELD and that she understands why it matters what she does, that maybe there is such a thing as truth and right and maybe there is beauty somewhere still in the world.

Maybe it wasn’t all a lie.

But she doesn’t know, because all the beauty in her world has always been a lie.

Slowly she starts to make a new life, a new self, and she is becoming something that isn’t what she was before. But she remembers, and she can’t let go of her past, because that shaped who she is today as much as him and SHIELD and everything she has made of herself since the day he brought her in from the cold.

She can’t let go, but she makes herself move on. She makes herself something different, and it is enough.

(but sometimes she hears music, and wants to dance, and she is so, so afraid because that is what they did to her, they made her think she loved ballet, but she doesn’t really, she was programmed, programmed like a computer, and what if this means she isn’t really free? This is a world of lies, and her greatest fear is that her new life and her new self and everything good that she does terrible things to defend is all a lie, and nothing has really changed at all)

She is a performer, so she never lets it show. She pretends she is fine and she pretends that she is done lying to the people that matter about the things that matter most.

She is in New York when it happens. There is a string of music escaping from a building in a run-down area that has seen better days, but isn’t bad, not bad like the worst parts of the city, not yet. And she hears voices and laughter and there is a girl walking out of the building – the studio, she realizes, the dance studio where there are dancers and there is music – and there is a little girl walking out and she has red hair, and she freezes. Can’t move, can’t breathe, and he is in her ear asking her why she’s stopped, and she says that everything is fine she pretends because she is a performer, and she moves on but she watches without looking like she’s watching and her eyes are on the girl

(look what I did today, mama, I learned a new position)

And the girl twirls, and spins, and she remembers

(look what I did today, mama, I killed a man and lied and lied and lied)

And she moves on but she goes back, one day, when there is no mission and there is no wire in her ear, and she is hidden in the shadows on the rooftop and she watches through the window as the girls inside stretch on the barre

(she stretched like that, she still does, a flexibility that lets her seize a man with her thighs and throw him to the ground, that lets her flip out of the way of danger and turn someone’s weight against them and hurt them and scare them and find out everything she needs to know before she kills)

And they move slowly, the girls, three or four or five years old, they don’t know how to do anything but they are taking their first steps, learning first position, moving their feet just so

And she is doing it too, sliding behind the shadow of the building, breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and trying to hold on to what she knows is her, now, here and now, and not before

Her feet slide into first position as if she was made to dance

(she was – made to and taught to and manipulated)

But they aren’t here now, and this isn’t the Red Room, and the girls were laughing and giggling as they learned their first steps, learned something beautiful

She runs.

She has always been good at running.

But somehow she finds herself back there again, watching through the window, watching the girls as they go to class and then leave, going home, going with parents and friends and family and going away from the studio like it’s only a moment in their life, like it’s not everything and failure doesn’t matter and they aren’t going to be killed or reprogrammed or – 

\- and they’re not, she realizes, they’re not, they’re just making something beautiful because they want to.

She breathes.

She runs.

He asks her, once, where she goes on their days off and she shrugs him off, cold and ice and emotionless, she knows any weakness is a target and if you let them find somewhere to target they’ll take you  
down, they’ll make you something less than what you are, they’ll betray you and leave you gasping and dying with nothing to hold onto

(he’s not like them, a voice in her head says, but she pushes it aside. Trust is a weakness, and love is for children.)

He is curious, she knows, and he follows her, and when she loses him in the streets sometimes it’s because he lets her, and she doesn’t know what to think, doesn’t know what to do, and sometimes she thinks she should stop going, stop watching these little innocent girls be turned into something graceful and deadly

(but they’re not, not deadly, not like her, they’re just dancing)

And she doesn’t stop. She always goes back, and one day, she lets him follow her. She doesn’t try to lose her tail and she knows that he doesn’t know why, and she thinks maybe she doesn’t know why, either.

And she knows he is confused, when he watches her as she watches them, but she wants it to make sense, wants to make sense out of a world full of lies, so she watches, but she doesn’t mimic, doesn’t make the forms, just watches until the class is gone and she is sitting on an empty rooftop watching an empty building

(and she feels empty, too)

This is something she hates that she loves, because it wasn’t real, it was a lie, it was all them.

But now, she thinks, maybe it wasn’t all them, because they didn’t know anything about love, and they never would have made her love something that wasn’t the mission, that wasn’t them, that wasn’t the job and the killing and the lies

(and love is for children, but she thinks maybe she still loves ballet)

Ballet is something they taught her, but so is fighting and shooting and killing and lying, but she hasn’t left all that behind. She’s turned it into something new, taken it and made it her own, made it something that she uses to undo what came before, to wipe out the red in her ledger.

She is standing on an empty rooftop next to an empty building, and there is no one around but him.

And she doesn’t know what trust is, but she thinks maybe he won’t betray her, if he sees this weakness.

He has the patience of a sniper, and he sits and waits and watches while the night passes, but she doesn’t leave.

She moves.

The center of the rooftop is flat and wide, and she moves to the middle and stands there, perfectly still, perfectly poised. She is caught between right and wrong and past and future and so many memories that she feels like she is being torn apart and she needs control, she needs the same control that she has always had over herself to know that she isn’t flying to pieces

She takes a step, and moves slowly into first position. She feels his eyes on her, senses, somehow, that he’s snapped a little straighter, coming into focus, and maybe he’s thinking that she wanted to learn but he has no idea, she doesn’t have to learn, she has to take it back from the ones who took it from her, he doesn’t know what they did to make her into a weapon but he does know what she’s made of herself, and maybe this is something he will understand, that she has to take back the last of what they took from her

(and if it’s not the last, if there’s other wounds and other memories that ache she isn’t ready to face that, can’t admit it even to herself)

But this is a victory.

And she spins, suddenly, bringing up her arms, and she’s not wearing pointe shoes and a leotard she’s wearing dark clothes and she’s left her shoes behind, she’s barefoot on a rooftop in the middle of the night and all at once she is a supernova, controlled intensity and bright motion and beautiful explosions of motion and stillness – 

She dances. She stops thinking, stops wondering, stops regretting, and she lets herself just be. She moves, and if she let herself think she would wonder when she started trusting him so much that she wouldn’t be constantly on guard around him, that she would let him in and let him be near her when she isn’t watching him and isn’t focusing on him at all, when she is hardly even aware that he is there 

– 

But she’s not thinking, she’s dancing, and when she’s moved through the beginner’s steps she begins to weave something more out of them, and she realizes that she is moving and moving and she hasn’t taken a single step back yet.

(Because when she goes backward she ends up running, and she is so, so tired of running)

So she does a pas de couru en avant, again and again across the rooftop, and moves on from there, everything moving the same direction, en avant, en avant, en avant

And when she ends with a grande jété, she realizes, suddenly

She is finally moving forward.

**Author's Note:**

> Pas de Couru: Running step, preparatory step for a jump  
> Grande Jété: lit. “big throw” A large jump in which the dancer has one leg forward and one leg back  
> I took one year of ballet when I was three years old, and while I enjoy watching ballet and have played music all my life, any technical knowledge, including ballet terms, comes from the internet. The definitions for ballet terms which I use in this story are taken from BalletHub’s Ballet Terms Dictionary, and if I misuse any terms, please feel free to let me know.


End file.
